Francesco Ferrucci, known as Francesco del Tadda, Diana with a dog, red marble Francesco Ferrucci, known as Francesco del Tadda (Fiesole 1497 - Florence 1585) DIANA WITH A DOG antique red marble sculpture, 36.8x12.5x9 cm; mounted on white marble base, 11x15.5x12.5 cm A rare sculpture executed in antique red marble, the statue shows a naked young woman with a well modelled and proportioned body, portrayed with a dog crouched between her legs. The presence of a half-moon in her hair iconographically qualifies the figure as Diana, one of the twelve Olympian deities worshipped in ancient Greece under the name of Artemis. According to Sandro Bellesi, author of a critical card for the sculpture presented here, the work is the result of a refined and intelligent interweaving in which knowledge of ancient statuary and affinities with 16th-century Florentine artistic culture converge, with stylistic features that, thanks also to the use of coloured stone, allow it to be convincingly assigned to the name of Francesco Ferrucci, better known as Francesco del Tadda, a sculptor who was especially skilled in working porphyry and stones not common in the world of sculpture. "The assignment of the statuette under examination to the catalogue of Francesco del Tadda," reads the card, "is based not only on the use of coloured stone, but also on the references to some of the most interesting sculptures fired by this master. The syntax of the face, arms and hands and, again, the turned breasts of Venus find direct juxtapositions with, for example, the majestic Justice in Piazza Santa Trinita, while the particular rendering of the hair with snail-shell curls refer to compositions such as the oval with Alessandro de' Medici now in the collections of the Bargello Museum. The dry and excessively linear cut of the goddess's facial features also shows appropriate comparisons with the bust of the dying Alessandro, executed by Ferrucci in red porphyry and white marble, now in the collections of the Museo dell'Opificio delle Pietre in Florence. Finally, the dog's particular descriptive syntax, a curious anticipation of 20th-century models reminiscent of Art Deco, allows us to place the execution of this marble in the middle of the Mannerist age, probably in the third quarter of the 16th century'.